As I've said before, the TM is a dispiriting place to visit, it's the pokiness of the galleries compared to the scale of the building, its the escalator layout which always dribbles you out on the level which you don't want to be. It's the feeling of being processed rather than free to wander amongst great art.

Malevich wasn't very good at painting, in the sense his stiffly painted surfaces cracked, and his shapes often look more chosen than felt. He was a very good artist despite his lack of facility. My favourites are the ones made under the doomy days of stalin, where he incorporates abstraction into the clothes of his usually faceless figures. The rest of the show looks like he's trying out (possibly inventing) the modern styles. The wall plaques plumb new lows of banality: drawing as a tool of thought, faceless peasants representing oppression... my paraphrases are pales shadows of the awfulness of the originals.

Maybe the cracked surfaces are the result of sub-standard materials? Things were tough back then and a lot of the emphasis was on 'faktura' - facture, so he strove for a deliberately worked surface. This as a way of anchoring the idealistic geometry. I think at one stage he may have mixed in pulped newsprint as a base? Anyway - note the famous squares never exactly remain parallel with the picture frame either. Dude was trying to talk about a concept of squareness without simply instantiating a square. Not easy and seldom appreciated.

Like everything Russian, it remains cloaked in an otherness that is never entirely exotic, or oriental, never quite European or western.

Although the term's provenance rests in African folklore (i.e., the gum doll Anansi created to trap Mmoatia), some Americans consider "tar baby" to be a pejorative term for African Americans.[14] The Oxford English Dictionary defines "tar baby" as "a difficult problem which is only aggravated by attempts to solve it",[15] but the subscription-only version adds a second definition: "a derogatory term for a Black (U.S.) or a Maori (N.Z.)".[16][17]

Several United States politicians—including presidential candidates John Kerry, John McCain, Michele Bachmann, and Mitt Romney—have been criticized by civil rights leaders, the media, and fellow politicians for using the "tar baby" metaphor.[17][18] An article in The New Republic argued that people are "unaware that some consider it to have a second meaning as a slur" and it "is an obscure slur, not even known to be so by a substantial proportion of the population." It continued that, "those who feel that tar baby's status as a slur is patently obvious are judging from the fact that it sounds like a racial slur".[19]

In other countries, the phrase continues to refer to problems worsened by intervention.[20]